See How Corpse Bride's Victor Van Dort Was Recreated in Blender & Substance 3D

Introduction

Greetings, everyone! I'm Krystsina, a 3D Artist. Graduating as an Architect in 2021, I discovered my true love in 3D Art, prompting me to make a deliberate shift in my career. I've been contributing as a 3D Artist to the AR studio for nearly 2 years, but art has played a pivotal role in my life for approximately 9 years.

The Victor Van Dort Project

I was looking for a new project to work on, and my main goal was to get into character art, try and learn new things, and refine my workflow. I deliberately avoided rushing through this project, choosing instead to invest time in each step to get the most out of it.

I was searching for a concept art/ movie character that would resonate with me and found five variants (three of which were from Tim Burton's animated movies because I am a big fan of his works). After carefully studying all the variants, I decided that Victor Van Dort was the best way for me to get into character art.

Also, I would like to say a big thank you to Ioann Dmitriev, whose feedback and support helped me throughout the process.

Before getting into blocking, I watched a movie for added inspiration and took as many screenshots as I needed along with other references. During the project, I added more references, especially for clothing.

The Workflow Behind the Head & Outfit

I started by working on a blocking of the shape in Blender to get the proportions right. Once I was happy with the result, I subdivided the mesh to work on smaller details and elaborate on the forms. In the beginning, I wasn't sure about the best way to start with the hair, so I made a very basic shape and decided that I might try working on it in ZBrush (that was a mistake as you can see in the screenshot).

In ZBrush, I sculpted the head and also the eyebrows, which I later remodelled in Blender for a more effective outcome. It's worth noting that it was my first ever experience with ZBrush and I still need a lot of practice. Also, I sculpted clothing and hand details, but shoes and buttons were modelled in Blender.

Regarding the hair, after my failed attempt to sculpt it, I decided to create it in Blender using curves. I scaled the vertices to achieve the desired form and made several shapes to use as Bevel objects in curve settings.

Retopology & Unwrapping

I did retopology in Blender by hand because I aimed to improve my skills through practice. UVs were also done in Blender. I divided the model into four tiles: Head, Body, Hair, and Pants/ Hands. It was important to align each piece of clothing to ensure the fabric patterns followed the correct direction. The same principle was with the hair. I used a texture with black and white stripes to see the UV islands' orientation.

Texturing

Baking and texturing were carried out in Substance 3D Painter. For the skin, I started with a substance skin material, adjusting it by adding Roughness and an Ambient Occlusion Map to darken the eye cavities and the border of the head and hair to kind of "bring them together". I painted wrinkles under the eyes and added some details to the skin using different substance textures like Gaussian spots, dirt, etc. For a hairstyle, I used anisotropic noise to replicate smaller strands.

Most clothing items have substance basic rough fabric material as a base to which I added color variations and curvature masks. My goal was to ensure the clothes looked appealing even in a base colour, as the roughness remained almost consistent across each piece.

Rendering & Lighting

I rendered everything in Blender's Cycles, but beforehand, I created a rig to pose the character, incorporating particle systems to simulate small hair strands on the clothing.

Corpse Bride's original poster served as my primary reference for composition and lighting.

I started by establishing a standard lighting system, setting up the main key, a blue-ish rim, and fill lights. Once happy with the outcome, I added more lights and adjusted light linking groups. I also had to use a small trick to have a shadow on the neck, I couldn't achieve the desired result by adjusting the lights so I added a plane near the neck to block the lights and hid it from a camera in Ray visibility settings.

Eventually, I color-corrected a bit in Photoshop.

Final Thoughts

Actually, the entire project was a significant challenge for me. Probably, the most challenging was to preserve the distinctive features that define the character's amazing design. Sculpting and texturing were tough but exciting. I learned a lot working on this character and drastically improved my workflow.

A big thanks to 80 Level for asking me to do this interview!

Krystsina Linkevich, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie